HighQ Cognitive Training Program

HighQ Cognitive Training Program

Our cognitive training program is highly unique in that it is designed to address ALL area of cognitive weakness, working with children individually and gets them to generalise their skills to everyday tasks. You would have probably seen the products on the market claiming they ‘train the brain’. Most of these programs have very strong results: they show that by having children practice gaming they will improve on these games after a certain period. But lets be practical! Most parents don’t care if their children have better gaming skills- they want for their children to be better learners, have stronger memory and better attention in school. We train kids in real-world tasks and get them to generalise their skills in the specific areas they have functional weaknesses in.

(1) Home based program

We give you a home-based training manual which involves various tasks you will be required to do with your child on a regular basis. We do not make this formal homework, but rather try and make this a fun experience. We recommend our program is done in places like the car on the way to school, waiting to pick up a sibling, whilst cooking dinner or even when they are watching TV. This way the child will learn how to build these skills in a variety of environments, whilst having many distractions. You can also do 5-10 minutes sitting quietly a few times a week for the more demanding tasks. We then supplement this training with iPad or tablet based training programs. Before we allow the child on these programs we teach them a special way to approach the tasks so that they are building core skills in the types of ways to approach tasks, strengthening the thought processes so they become more automatic. Doing these typical brain training games are useless if children aren’t trained in the techniques to improve their performance. Otherwise they just have failure after failure with no progression, getting more and more frustrated and lowering self-esteem.

(2) Centre-based program

We have your child attend one-on-one sessions with our cognitive trainers where we train your child in the core skills they are weak in. At first we start in quite abstract ways, using a variety of specially designed physical tools and over 16 specialist cognitive training programs. Once we have used these tools to practice specific ways of approaching tasks (eg. maintaining focus, memorising, approaching tasks in an organised manner etc) we then get your chid to take these core skills and generalise them to the real world.

Your child will be required to attend the centre for weekly sessions, either during school days or on a Saturday. Our programs usually go for a minimum of one term, but may require longer depending on the number of skills that need to be incorporated into one program.

As our program addresses all skills holistically it actually works out highly cost effective. Many psychologists recommend very specialised programs like CogMed. Whilst these have some benefits in improving skills, they cost thousands of dollars and only train one skill. We find that most children have 3-4 areas of weakness that require training for a child to maximise potential.